Jake Benilov will give a talk on September 27 at Agile Tour Brussels about feedback techniques used for making gov.uk. InfoQ did an interview with Jake about using the feedback techniques and how the team applies lean startup with minimum viable products to do user research.

With the rise of touch enabled smart-phones and tablets, a new category of user interfaces was introduced. And there are new technologies just around the corner: The 'Internet of Things' is becoming reality with lots of new device types that need to be considered when formatting output and natural user interfaces like speech and gesture provide challenges when interpreting input.

Announcing the first major redesign of InfoQ since its inception. The intention of this redesign is to make it easier for users to find content they want, to simplify most pages to emphasize content instead of sidebars and metadata, and to make the site easier to read and more tablet/mobile friendly.

In the Build 2012, Lora Heiny, Senior Program Manager, Windows Partner Ecosystem and Will Tschumy, Principal User Experience Advisor at Microsoft delivered a session where they presented few tips which should be followed to evaluate the UX of a Windows 8 application including that of Windows Store apps.

Microsoft has announced the new Blend for Visual Studio 2012, a tool to design user interfaces for HTML and XAML applications in Windows Store 8. All versions of Visual Studio 2012 come with Blend, including Express.

What is the most important thing that the Agile community needs to embrace in 2012 and beyond? InfoQ had the opportunity to attend the recent YOW! Australia Software Developer Conference and took the opportunity of having such a large number of Agile speakers in one place to sit in on the sessions and ask them their thoughts on this question.

Windows 8 Metro doesn’t just change the way applications look, it fundamentally changes how they behave. Applications will no longer be running in the background at all times, they will be suspended whenever they are not view. Rather than a save button, most applications will be constantly updating data on the cloud so that the user can seamlessly switch from one device to the next.

Many people who are new to Agile are confused about the place of UI and UX design on Agile teams. Previously many teams have tried keeping the work separate from the team or having the work done one sprint ahead. Recently, there has been more talk about welcoming UI and UX into Agile teams and Lean UX has been at the forefront.

On behalf of the InfoQ team, we are happy to announce our underwhelming first minor UI re-launch in our 5 year history. This re-launch is the first in a set of incremental changes that will end with a homepage re-launch later in the year, with your feedback. This first launch maintains the same look and feel but removes the left bar while expanding the header and footer.

In a recent article by Jonathan Strickland for HowStuffWorks the author addresses Web 3.0. This "long anticipated and disruptive new technology" is supposed to increase the possibilities of users and providers. But what exactly is the Web 3.0?

Microsoft has released an update to Expression Web 4 to support HTML 5 and CSS 3 development. This update, part of Service Pack 1, is only a partial solution; it offers IntelliSense and error-checking support but with only partial preview support. This update also includes expanded support for PHP IntelliSense.